I got one of these on sale, but even now the price is $170 which is not a bad deal at all. The notebook, is very thin, light and surprisingly not bad, the keyboard is not as good as on thinkpads, but could be much, much worse. Beware that here are no PgUp, PgDown, Home, Ins, Del keys so after some remapping ALT + Cursor keys work. Also on top row F-keys labelled weirdly as in chromium-specific function keys but are in fact F1-F10. POWER button is where F11 was supposed to be. POWER key works most of the time, hard reset button is F3+POWER. There is left `Super` key, which is something in between of Fn and 'Windows logo' key, but it's located where 'Caps Lock' is on regular keyboard. When I got the chromebook it was configured for an organization 'enrollment program', it took some googling to figure out how to set that back to regular settings. After logging in with my gmail credentials and finding ChromeOS to be sleek but somewhat useless, I claimed my free 1TB of Google drive storage (* Free for 2 years) and decided to install Debian, giving it full computing resources and not messing around with crouton. Removing ChromeOS involves undoing 7 screws on the bottom and removing BIOS write-protect screw, then pressing Ctrl+D during boot turns chromebook into regular laptop with SeaBios. Wifi card is atheros-something, but it's not the best card and seems to be a little finicky on some wireless networks, the biggest annoyance -- you need to add a script that unloads the drivers before laptop falls asleep, otherwise screen will lockup on wakeup. I haven't tried using bluetooth yet. After getting rid of everything chrome-related the hardware seems to be pretty open, this laptop might even be a new candidate computer for RMS. I ended up with vanilla Debian Jessie and KDE (kde-plasma-netbook, which is really stock KDE but with some netbook-specific UI tweaks). I had to install Wheezy first as 3.16 kernel in Jessie would not boot, and then I had to install 3.17 as it's the first linux version that supports touchpad. Touchpad hardware is pretty awkward, but it does support multitouch and has a middle mouse button when you press on the middle of it with three fingers. I needed to do lots of tweaking to get everything working, but in the end it is a pretty sweet laptop. If I were installing the OS from scratch again, I would have gone with Chrubuntu. Battery life is pretty good -- I ran about 3+ hours without laptop-mode-tools/cpufreq-utils and 6+ hours with. At that point I still had about 3 hours battery left, I just didn't need to run the laptop any more. With 20% screen brightness, powertop shows ~4W on idle, ~11W playing 720p video off youtube (with wireless card using about ~6W). There's 2GB of Ram soldered onto the board and not upgradable, storage however is, it's an 16GB M.2 card. The laptop has an SD slot, but SD card sticks about half way out so it's impractical to go with one as a permanent storage. I'm going to upgrade to a 128GB one but M.2 is a relatively new standard, in the US it is $12 cheaper even after currency conversion. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EZ2E8NO http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00IZNYDBG If anyone interested in getting a laptop, and then installing Debian, here are few links I found useful. http://blogs.fsfe.org/the_unconventional/2014/04/20/c720-debian/ https://blogs.fsfe.org/the_unconventional/2014/09/19/c720-coreboot/ http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devi... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromebook https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acer_C720_Chromebook http://sweetohm.net/html/debian-jessie-acer-c720p.en.html http://www.circuidipity.com/c720-lubuntubook-install.html https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/xorg-conf/+/master/50-... Also here's my xbindkeysrc, which I compile from a few links above, I'm using ALT as a modifier key: .xbindkeysrc #Backlight Down "xbacklight -dec 5" m:0x8 + c:72 Alt + F6 #Backlight Up "xbacklight -inc 5" m:0x8 + c:73 Alt + F7 #Mute "amixer set Master toggle" m:0x8 + c:74 Alt + F8 #Decrease Volume "amixer set Master 2%- unmute" m:0x8 + c:75 Alt + F9 #Increase Volume "amixer set Master 2%+ unmute" m:0x8 + c:76 Alt + F10 # added Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Down, and Del keys using the Alt+arrow key combos #Delete "xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Delete]'" m:0x8 + c:22 Alt + BackSpace #End "xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[End]'" m:0x8 + c:114 Alt + Right #Home "xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Home]'" m:0x8 + c:113 Alt + Left #Page Down "xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Page_Down]'" m:0x8 + c:116 Alt + Down #Page Up "xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Page_Up]'" m:0x8 + c:111 Alt + Up # On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 2:23 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh@mimosa.com> wrote:
This can run linux with a bit of work. Pretty good netbook. As described by several folks on this list. (Not yet me -- haven't got the conversion working yet.)
$144.99 plus $4.99 shipping plus taxes.
< http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834314635&cm_re=c720-_-34-314-635-_-Product
Other tricks:
You can join the newegg "premier" program for a 30-day free trial and get free shipping ($60 per year afterwords).
If you pay with VISA, you can get $25 off your first purchase of $150 or more. Read about that here < http://forums.redflagdeals.com/newegg-25-off-purchases-over-150-using-visa-1...
Expires December 5.
You would have to add something to your order to qualify for this since the c720 is less than $150.
Sadly, newegg shipping is not reduced when you combine items within an order.
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